What’s A Rundown Review?

As we’ve moved into yet another year at the CR here, we’ve started laying out the roadmap for 2017 and the various changes and improvements we hope to make. There’s quite a few of them that we’re optimistic about, and we’ll probably be sharing a longer post about that in the weeks ahead. But for starters, we wanted to briefly mention a new subset of reviews we’re going to start doing, which we’re calling a Rundown Review.

We want to review games. That’s part of why we’re here. Our bottleneck is that with such a limited crew, it’s hard for us to have any more frequency with our traditional in-depth reviews than what we currently muster (which is at best one a week). At one point earlier this year, we realized that has become an issue for us. So we started contemplating ways of correcting that bottleneck in a way that suited us. And one of them was the idea of a Rundown Review.

In short, the idea behind a Rundown Review is that they’re designed to be shorter and more concise than our full length reviews and which focus more prominently on our Archetype system, as we firmly feel that’s the best way to convey who a game is aimed at. That hasn’t changed. What the Rundowns allow us to do is twofold:

They allow us to cover games that we either don’t need as comprehensive a review on or ones that we otherwise may not be able to due to time restraints.

Their more concise nature in theory would allow us to do them with greater frequency than a standard review, thereby getting out more than one a week.

That’s the experiment anyway. So we’ll see how this goes.

Our processes with Rundowns aren’t any different than normal reviews in terms of our commitment to diversifying our playthroughs with different player types, player sizes, and the number of times we get it to the table. Moreover, we aren’t abandoning our traditional reviews.

In the weeks ahead, we’re going to be trying out some different combinations of releases between the two review styles to see what’s the most feasible for us in terms of speeding up releases, so keep an eye out!